Archive for June 16th, 2007

Mike Elston, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty’s chief of staff, is the the latest rat to abandon Bush’s ship of state. Elston was accused of threatening at least four of the eight purged attorneys to keep them from talking about the purge.

Elston joined the Justice Department in 1999; he’s worked for McNulty since 2002, when McNulty was a U.S. attorney in Virginia.

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Above: Unofficial insignia used by 1st Cav. in Iraq. Steve could probably tell you why this was not a very wise choice of symbols

Thanks to Sam Seder, you can [if you follow the magic decoder instructions below] listen to the late Steve Gilliard at the following two links. Sam posted them on 6/11 and warns that he can’t keep them up long, so– click, already!:

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I was reading the latest horror story from Walter Reed Army Medical Center:

The Army said Friday that it has opened an investigation into the recent discovery of 4,500 letters and parcels — some dating to May 2006 — at Walter Reed that were never delivered to soldiers.

And this sentence jumped out at me:

And it fired the contract employee who ran the mailroom.

Rightwingers want us to believe that “government” is a Bad Thing, and in particular that it’s a Bad Thing for government to provide services that, you know, private companies could be making a profit for providing.

Except that private companies all too often make a profit for not providing those services. They’re in it to make money, not to provide the services per se.

The Constitution says, right there in the Preamble, that the United States government was formed to “promote the general welfare”. We’ve seen enough examples of how privatizing services that are properly the purview of the federal government damages the general welfare. Can we maybe have privatization declared unconstitutional? A girl can dream.